You know what they say: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. These days it's most likely that impression will be online. In this piece, we consider the top five mistakes businesses make online that leave a bad taste in customers' mouths.

November 2003 Issue

News Features

This was the year of steak—lean steak—and little unnecessary sizzle at the Seybold San Francisco 2003 conference held in early September. The Seybold Seminars management team—faced with contemporary economic realities in the IT industry and recognizing that past exhibitors needed at least as much bang for fewer show-budget buck—reinvented the event, implementing a modular, homogeneous booth design for all participants.

Digital content storage is big and dumb. To effectively do more than sit and store, it requires layers of complexity on top of its simple archival core. But the evolution of digital content has changed our expectations: We don’t just want to keep content, we want to access it, collaborate on it, and re-use it. Thus, stuffing assets away in some big box won’t do and if getting to it has to be a high-level IT function, then what happens to the goals of building a broader user base?

In 2001, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved seven new top-level domains (TDLs) for Web addresses. Although these seven extensions provide some much needed elbow room on the Internet, they leave out a vast array of possible extensions that could serve some practical—if not legal or ethical, purposes—such as the .xxx extension for use by purveyors of adult content.

Featured Stories

A great deal of business content is unstructured information or, even
harder to pin down, it’s somewhere out on the World Wide Web waiting
to be found. There exists a range of business intelligence software
available to help companies use this information to run their businesses
more efficiently.

When it comes to a specific question, such as, “How does XML support taxonomy development and usage?” the answers that come forth can be far-flung, disparate, and confusing. The waters get muddied further if you tune into all the announcements from the vendors, industry groups, and analysts who have opinions about such matters.

Gale’s ambitious Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) project currently consists of seven subject modules containing 150,000 works totaling approximately 33 million pages and will allow a plethora of works to be added digitally to the collections of libraries worldwide.

Drawing from a data archive of nearly one billion proper names used worldwide, LAS software uses patent-pending technology to identify names by culture and confidence factor both for its core government market and for general business intelligence usage.

Columns

It all sounds so familiar. If online users won’t buy content in the usual offline model of subscribing to individual titles, let’s try aggregating a number of top offline brands and sell ’em all for one low monthly price.

For nearly 10 years, Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has remained the undisputed standard for visually-faithful electronic renditions of print documents. With such momentum, what more could Adobe do? Not rest on its laurels.

We’re in the econtent business, people! We’re not buying and selling something that can be touched and held. Instead of the visible stuff, we’ve got to focus on communicating how our services facilitate people doing their jobs better.

Some still read for pleasure, but as a society, we are expected to ingest ever more information and, as such, seek the most expedient means to slurp up what we need to know. And, without a doubt, the browser/search engine combination has caused a tectonic shift in the way we expect to locate and consume the information we seek.